Edge-supported Microservice-based Resource Discovery for Mist Computing

Mist computing extends the Internet of Things computing infrastructures to the IoT devices at the edges of the networks. The dynamic characteristics of the IoT environments and resource limitations of the devices introduce challenges to the orchestration of the mist platform resources. In this paper, we present a hybrid resource discovery solution for mist, based on the IETF CoRE Resource Directories deployed as containerized Microservices to the supporting edge devices. This way the directory instances can be deployed on-demand as part of the edge platform, where each instance serves a mist network connected to the hosting edge device. This enables low latency resource queries at one-hop distance for the mist applications. At the edge layer, the directories form a distributed discovery infrastructure, connecting resources in disparate mist networks with each other and cloud and edge applications. A real-world prototype of such discovery infrastructure is implemented, based on low resource edge devices hosting the directory instances and low-power embedded devices as the mist resource servers and clients. The prototype is evaluated with latency and power consumption measurements, where the results show that discovery latency is as low as half a millisecond with a low power consumption.